How a marketplace shut down a realtor scam ring.

Where they were before.

• A decade of optimizing for ease of use. Anyone could open an account and be messaging a broker minutes later.
• Moderation was manual. People read reports as they arrived and acted on them one at a time.
• IPQS and FingerprintJS were already in place, so individual signals existed. Nothing tied a new signup back to the person behind it.

What was happening.

The same four steps, repeated almost every day for five months.

1. 01 Sign up with a fictitious phone number and a disposable email.
2. 02 Message brokers, push the conversation off platform, and phish for payment and account details.
3. 03 Collect complaints until enough reports stack up for the account to be blocked.
4. 04 Start again the next morning under a new identity.

What linked them.

Content moderation flagged every one of these accounts as a scam or phishing operation. Reuse is what tied them together: each identity was new, but the person behind them was not, and the naming pattern gave up the rest of the ring.

What changed.

Scam accounts are now caught at signup or on the first message, before a broker ever sees one. The daily cycle of complaints, review and blocks is gone, and customer success spends its time somewhere else.

Fewer scam reports and blocks

~90%

Fewer scam reports and blocks

Linked accounts removed at once

~70

Linked accounts removed at once

Caught before the first message

Day 1

Caught before the first message